Though always a staple of the left, only in recent decades has the militantly anti-masculine line been noticed by the public. Claims that handshakes are emblematic of the patriarchy are laughable, but that there are “researchers” producing studies trying to prove that testosterone is linked to anti-social behavior is worrisome, even when mainstream journals have shown these more extreme claims to be false, and even the opposite, that testosterone is linked to fairness and altruism. We all know the aggressively anti-male rhetoric to be the ravings of lunatics, and it is easy to make a mockery of it. For old time’s sake, and to demonstrate the obvious foolishness of the arch-feminist’s position, let us deconstruct the idea that gender and sex (keep in mind that the heavy-weights, like Judith Butler, maintain that sex is a social construct just as much as gender is) are social constructs, and that the differences between men and women is due to The Patriarchy.
“Let us accept that sex is indeed an ideal construct. After all, can we withhold any and all normative judgments, or resist imposing a teleology, once we are confronted with the body? No, and this is not only for sex but for all things. Our eyes are also ideal constructs. What? Or do you deny that we cannot speak of eyes without tacitly holding a set of social norms and expectations for sight and seeing? Was blind Tiresias not subject to these norms and expectations on account of the mere “materiality” of his eyes. Blindness is a genetic fact! Yet, Tiresias was able to see better than those who fell within the prescribed and accepted social boundaries. Let us not hamper logic, no, let us declare that all aspects of the body are ideal constructs. This is what we must say, and must affirm if we are not to submit to a social regime we had no part in making and which might turn out to be highly problematic. When this regime started is hard to say, for although the social norms and regulative practices attached to sex have undeniably changed over time and place (both husband and wife used to work at home prior to the industrial revolution, for example) there are nevertheless the identifiable categories “masculinity” and femininity “that” have existed in Christendom, the Caliphates, and pagan antiquity. Such a regime would have to be a shadow regime, one that existed and held power in competing and even violently opposed societies. If not, then this regime would need to be a subconscious will to dominate, most likely by white cis males, drawing on social roles so dark and mysterious that they must have inhabited the collective unconsciousness since before recorded history. In maintaining the ideal construction of sex, we are forced to accept that all parts of the body are ideal constructions…there is no “body, there is no “biology”, there are only ideal constructions. Further, these ideal constructions either must have sprung from a universal and shadow conspiracy, or they must come from the collective unconsciousness of men who have acted in such one accord, a unity that has up until now never been seen, that in all places and at all times there are the clearly identifiable categories “masculine” and “feminine.” No man has broke from the party line, none has dared to be a whistleblower and exposed the materialization of the eyes or of sex.”1
Confronted with lies about masculinity, there has been numerous attempts to assert masculinity’s virtues. This has led, however, to an embrace of the negative strawmen erected by masculinity’s opponents. As the right has, to its detriment, assumed the identity of “racist” and “reactionary”, to “own the libs”, it has also dabbled in self-identifying as “misogynist”, “sexist”, and has come to idealize the (highly historically contingent) gender relations of 1950s America. Pick-up artists, who made a comeback with the swarthy rapist Andrew Tate, teach young men to see women as objects, and rate masculinity on account of how “many bodies” one has had. Heavily promoted on TikTok and YouTube Shorts is the other variant of reactive masculinity, which is “the sigma male.” Tomas Shelby, Walter White, Patrick Bateman, and Tony Soprano (apologies for missing your favorite) flash on the screen, less than a second at a time, showing scenes of the respective men bossing people around, making threats, and, in general, commanding the room. I would be the last to say something negative about self-confidence, or self-advocacy, but the almost exclusive concentration of criminals in these montages is telling, and that what is being promoted is not self-confidence, but self-worship.
Chesterton points out the fatal flaw in both of these charactures better than I could, charactures, which trying to give men their chests back inflate them up so much that they have a little worth as the inflatable outside a used-car dealership,
“Once I remember walking with a prosperous publisher, who made a remark which I had often heard before; it is, indeed, almost a motto of the modern world. Yet I had heard it once too often, and I saw suddenly that there was nothing in it. The publisher said of somebody, "That man will get on; he believes in himself." And I remember that as I lifted my head to listen, my eye caught an omnibus on which was written "Hanwell." I said to him, "Shall I tell you where the men are who believe most in themselves? For I can tell you. I know of men who believe in themselves more colossally than Napoleon or Caesar. I know where flames the fixed star of certainty and success. I can guide you to the thrones of the Super-men. The men who really believe in themselves are all in lunatic asylums." He said mildly that there were a good many men after all who believed in themselves and who were not in lunatic asylums. "Yes, there are," I retorted, "and you of all men ought to know them. That drunken poet from whom you would not take a dreary tragedy, he believed in himself. That elderly minister with an epic from whom you were hiding in a back room, he believed in himself. If you consulted your business experience instead of your ugly individualistic philosophy, you would know that believing in himself is one of the commonest signs of a rotter. Actors who can't act believe in themselves; and debtors who won't pay. It would be much truer to say that a man will certainly fail, because he believes in himself. Complete self-confidence is not merely a sin; complete self-confidence is a weakness.”2
Critiquing bad ideas are easy, and, while fun, is not the point of this series. We are looking for what views of masculinity are within the Western tradition. For this, let us look at the two epic great heroes: Odysseus and Aeneas.
Odysseus: Manliness and Home
Of the great epics, the Odyssey is the most well-known. Still taught in most American high schools, though rarely by a decent exegete, the story of Odysseus’ perilous journey back home, being both sabotaged and aided by the gods, is the adventure tale.
Asking, “what is manliness”, can quickly become a Platonic quest, looking for the Form of Manliness. Homer was not Plato, and while it is possible to put the two in conversation, to understand manliness in the Homeric context requires us allowing the Odyssey to be non-Platonic. Alasdair MacIntyre, in Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, summarizes the Homeric concept of virtue as follows:
“The order over which Zeus and human kings rein is one structured in terms of hierarchically ordered social rules. To know what is required of you is to know what your place is within that structure and to do what your role requires…To do what my role requires, to do it well, deploying the skills necessary to discharge what someone in that role owes to others, is to be agathos. ‘Agathos’ comes to be translatable by ‘good’, and ‘arete’, the corresponding noun, by ‘excellence’ or ‘virtue’; but since originally to be agathos is to be good at doing what one’s role requires, and since the primary all-important role is that of the warrior-king, it is unsurprising that ‘arete’ originally names the excellence of such a king.”3
To be manly is to perform the role proper to that of a man. What is the role proper to a man? We are looking for an activity, not character traits or skills. Character traits and skills are what enables someone to fulfill their role. Describing courage as a manly virtue, is not wrong, but, under the Homeric concept, courage does not make a man. Courage, or any other virtue, aids a man in doing what a man ought to do. Looking at Odysseus, we see many admirable qualities, skills, and virtues, and he is rightly praised for them, but to find out what manliness is, we need to look at what he was using these for. To this end, let’s look at a few quotations:
“He stepped from the violet-tinctured sea
On to dry land and proceeded to the cavern
Where Calypso lived. She was at home.
A fire blazed on the hearth, and the smell
Of split cedar and abor vitae burning
Spread like incense across the whole island.
She was seated inside, singing in a lovely voice
As she wove at her loom with a golden shuttle.
Around her cave the woodland was in bloom,
Alder and poplar and fragrant cypress.
Long-winged birds nested in the leaves,
Horned owls and larks and slender-throated shorebirds
That screech like crows over the bright saltwater.
Tendrils of ivy curled around the cave’s mouth,
The glossy green vine clustered with berries.
Four separate springs flowed with clear water, criss-
Crossing channels as they meandered through meadows
Lush with parsley and blossoming violets.
It was enough to make even a visiting god
Enraptured at sight. Quicksilver Hermes
Took it all in, then turned and entered
The vast cave.
Calypso knew him at sight.
The immortals have ways of recognizing each other,
Even those whose homes are in outlying districts.
But Hermes didn’t find the great hero inside.
Odysseus was sitting on the shore,
As ever those days, honing with his heart’s sorrow,
Staring out to sea with hollow, salt-rimmed eyes.”4
We find Odysseus on an island paradise, a paradise so great, keep in mind, that immortals are taken back by it, an island paradise which is home to a goddess who is in love with him. All Odysseus’ necessities are taken care of, and he has the option to spend his days living in heaven on earth, eating and drinking ambrosia and nectar5, the food and drink conferring immortality, and making love to a goddess. And yet, the hero is sitting away from all of that, depressed, and longing for home. Outside of the Homeric conception of virtue, Odysseus' state is almost unintelligible. How could one possibly be depressed when surrounded with the beauties of nature, the food and drink of immortality, and a goddess who is so in love with you that she demands you live with her, make love to her, and becoming a god with her? Yes, some of you are noble enough to think of your family, to miss them, or worry about their well-being. But imagine you have been lost at sea for years, your family likely thinks you are dead, you wife, thinking you are dead, in all likelihood remarried, and every time you take to the seas, the gods try and kill you. Leaving Calypso's Island is risking death, not just for you, but your crew, and should you survive, you might very well come home to find your wife with a new husband, who is now being called "father" by your children. Should we think of pure self-interest or play a prisoner-dilemma type game with this situation, Odysseus should have stayed with Calypso.
If Odysseus stayed with Calypso, however, he would not have been Odysseus. Unlike the self-interested man, Odysseus is a manly man. Since being agathos is using all of one’s skills and strengths to fulfill one’s social role, and we will later see Odysseus use his iconic command of rhetoric to persuade Calypso to let him leave, we can conclude that the role of a man is to be with his family, regardless of self-interest or probability games. Manliness, and Odysseus is representative of Classical Greek manliness, is being with one’s family, and denying all pleasures that come in the way of family.
Recounting all of the ways that Odysseus fought to get back home, to be where a man ought to be, would simply be telling the Odyssey in toto. One more quotation will have to do, and while this series is not polemical, it is, as all texts are, read against a certain background, and the background in question is either a complete vilification of manliness, or what is worse, pretending self-absorbed pride to be the same thing. Thus, in light of this background, let’s look at one more instance of Odysseus denying his own interests for the sake of returning home:
“He spoke, and threw around his shoulders
His ratty pouch, full of holes and slung
By a twisted cord. Eumaeus gave him a staff
That suited him, and the two of them set out.
The dogs and the herdsmen stayed behind
To guard the farmstead. And so the swineherd
Led his master to the city, looking like
An old, broken-down beggar, leaning
On a staff and dressed in miserable rags.”6
And then later,
“ There
Melanthius, son of Dolius, met them
As he was driving his she-goats, the best
In the herds, into town for the suitors’ dinner.
Two herdsmen trailed along by him.
When he saw Eumaeus and his companion,
He greeted them with language so ugly
It made Odysseus’ blood boil to hear it:
Well, look at this, trash dragging along trash.
Birds of a feather, as usual. Where
Are you taking this walking pile of shit,
You miserable hog-tender, this diseased eggar
Who will slobber all over our feasts?
How many doorposts has he rubbed with his shoulders,
Begging for scraps? You think he’s ever gotten
A proper present, a cauldron or sword? Ha!
Give him to me and I’ll have him sweep out the pens
And carry loads of shoots for the goats to eat,
Put some muscle on his thigh by drinking whey.
I’ll bet he’s never done a hard day’s work in his life.
No, he prefers to beg his way through town
For food to stuff into his bottomless belly.
I’ll tell you this, though, and you can count on it.
He’ll be pelted with footstools aimed at his head.
If he’s lucky they’ll only splinter on his ribs.
And as he passed Odysseus, the fool kicked him
On the hip, trying to shove him off the path.
Odysseus absorbed the blow without even quivering—
Only stood there and tried to decide whether
To jump the man and knock him dead with his staff
Or lift him by the ears and smash his head to the ground.
In the end, he controlled himself and just took it.”7
Disguising himself, the great warrior, as a swineherd to allow his presence to go undetected by the multitude of men trying to marry his wife, already a humiliation for one of Greece’s finest soldiers and kings, Odysseus then sees the only servant who remained faithful to him cruelly mocked, and then, he himself, kicked off the road by one of his wife’s suitors. Allowing one’s servants and oneself to be treated this way, on the face of it, is a disgrace. Shortly after this incident, when the time was right, Odysseus did reclaim his honor, and slew every last suitor. It was not slaying the suitors that restored Odysseus’s honor, per se. Rather, by slaying the suitors the great hero was finally able to be with his wife and son and live in his own home. Honor and dignity are not floating signifiers, but, in the Homeric imagination, attached to something specific and concrete: one’s social role. As man, Odysseus’ honor was bound to his home, by being there, and having rule over it. Holding in his rage was not simply a strategic calculation on Odysseus’ part (if I wait, I can slay them all later, instead of alerting them of my presence now), but a matter of agathos. Suppressing his desire to rectify the wrong done to him (keep in mind that the mistreatment of a servant was not so much an offence against the servant, but the master), Odysseus made it possible to rectify the wrong done to his home.
What does it mean to be a man? The Odyssey answers as follows: to be a man is to fulfill the role proper to a man, which is being home.
Aeneas: Manliness and Virtue
As Odysseus had to go on an Odyssey, Aeneas, his Roman equivalent, had to go on an Aeneid. Virgil, providing the myth that would later give legitimacy to the Caesars and the Roman Empire, wrote a parallel epic to Homer’s, telling of what happened to the Trojans after they fell at the hands of the Greeks, framing the latter as villains (one of many reversals). Instead of traveling home, Aeneas, whose home as laid to waste, is on the mission to found Rome. What masculinity looks like in Aeneas will, by the epic’s Roman background, be undoubtably be affected by the Roman philosophy: Stoicism. Although we will look at Stoicism in depth later in this series, we can summarize it here in a few bullet points:
The only things that can hurt us are those things we allow to hurt us.
A principal source of our pain is our attachment, especially emotional attachment to persons, places, and things.
There exists a universal moral law, binding for all people.
Our soul, which is likely made of fire (our bodies go cold after the soul leaves the body, after we die), is rational, and this rational nature is what puts us above the beasts.
Alongside Stoic detachment, there is, written in the universal moral law, strong duties to those under one’s protection. Whether I care for my family, workers, or crew (in the case of Aeneas), is not at issue. It might actually be harmful should I become too attached to my child, wife, worker, or friend, because when they eventually pass away, or move on, I will be pained, and/or my attachment might get in the way of my duties to them. Becoming too strongly attached to my child, let us say, might make me spare him punishments and sparing him those punishments will lead him to have no regard for rules or orderliness, hurting him later in life when he is in school or gets a job. When Neptune causes a storm to rest, his actions are compared to a man exemplifying Stoic virtue:
“Quicker than his command he calms the heaving seas,
putting the clouds to rout and bringing back the sun.
Struggling shoulder-to-shoulder, Triton and Cymothoe
hoist and heave the ships from the jagged rocks
as the god himself whisks them up with his trident,
clearing a channel through the deadly reefs, his chariot
skimming over the cresting waves on spinning wheels
to set the seas to rest. Just as, all too often,
some huge crowd is seized by a vast uprising.
the rabble runs amok, all slaves to passion,
rocks, firebrands flying. Rage finds them arms
but then, if they chance to see a man among them,
one whose devotion and public service lend him weight,
they stand there, stock-still with their ears alert as
he rules their furor with his words and calms their passion.
So the crash of the breakers all fell silent once their Father,
gazing over his realm under clear skies, flicks his horses,
giving them free rein, and his eager chariot flies."8
Looking to the gods as any sort of moral model is a non-starter, Homer and Virgil, both depicting them as petty, vengeful tyrants, and Neptune’s positive image here, revealingly, is on account of how he, an immortal, was acting like a mortal. A man appears in the midst of a crowd gripped by passion. Keeping with Stoic teaching, passion is a bad thing. Unlike action, whose verbal form is “active”, passion’s verbal form is “passive”, and to be passive, to have passions, is to let one’s surroundings (which are a-rational) overcome the soul (which is rational). Greed, jealousy, love, hatred, and fear, to name a few, are all passions, they are all examples of the soul being led by something other than itself, and this, in the last analysis, is to let reason be led by non-reason. Yet, a man appears. This man, because he is a man, through his reputation, is able to assuage the crowd’s passions, get them to calm down, and see reason. Being himself able to manage his passions, subjecting them to reason, the man is able to encourage his fellows to likewise pursue virtue.
Shortly after this passage, we find “bone-weary” Aeneas and his shipmates crash-landed, and without any food but grain.
“ While they see to their meal
Aeneas scales a crag, straining to scan the sea-reach
far and wide…is there any trace of Antheus, now
tossed by the gales, or his warships banked with oars?
Or Capys perhaps, or Caicus’ stern adorned with shields?
Not a ship in sight. But he does spot three stags
roaming the shore, and entire herd behind them
grazing down the glens in a long ranked line.
He halts, grasps his bow and his flying arrows,
the weapons his trusty aide Achates keeps at hand.
First the leaders, antlers branching over their high heads,
he brings them down, then turns on the herd, his shafts
stampeding the rest like rabble into the leafy groves.
Shaft on shaft, no stopping him till he stretches
seven hefty carcasses on the ground—a triumph,
one for each of his ships—and makes for the cove,
divides the kill with his whole crew and then shares out
the wine that good Acestes, princely man, had brimmed
in their casks the day they left Sicilian shores.”9
Aeneas, as captain of his crew, is to provide for them, not out of affection, but because that is what a captain ought to do. If he asked, Aeneas’ men would have hunted the game for him, but he does not. Instead, it is the captain who kills the seven stags, butchers them, and then feeds his men. Thinking back to MacIntyre, Homeric virtue is centered around social station, whereas Stoic virtue is universalist because of the existence of a transcendent moral law (which is either absent, or less pronounced in the Homeric world), but we see that both Odysseus and Aeneas are driven to fulfill their duties. Odysseus is driven to return home, because the station of a man is with his family, and Aeneas is driven to provide, because a man ought to provide for those dependent on him. Similar conclusions, but the former is arrived at from a particularist starting point (given my particular position, I have the following obligation), while the latter is derived from a universal moral precept (all those in position X ought to do moral action Y).
In line with the moral law, courage, like providing, is demanded of a man. Towards the end of the Aeneid, Virgil gives what might be called a Roman Iliad, reversing the order of Homer, beginning with a journey home, and then ending with a war. Trojans, before they became Romans, had to fight a war against the Latins, the native inhabitants of Latium, which would, after Trojan victory, become Rome. As the war is raging, spilling from the battlefield into the city, Aeneas and Turnus, the two opposing generals, decide to fight one-on-one to conclude the battle faster, and with minimal death.
“ But
the great commander, hearing the name of Turnus,
deserts the walls, deserts the citadel’s heights
and breaks off all operations, jettisons all delay—
he springs in joy, drums his shield and it thunders terror.
As massive as Athos, massive as Eryx or even Father
Apennine himself, roaring out with his glistening oaks,
elated to raise his snow-capped brow to the winds. And then,
for a fact, the Rutulians, Trojans, all the Italians,
those defending the high ramparts, those on the attack
who batter the walls’ foundations with their rams:
all armies strained to turn their glances round
and lifted their battle-armor off their shoulders.
Latinus himself is struck that these two giant men,
sprung from opposing ends of the earth, have met,
face-to-face, to let their swords decide.”10
Aeneas is not simply eager, but “springs with joy” to fight the one man who could match him in battle. Why? Fighting someone less than yourself has no honor. Only a fight with an equal merits honor. In a fight with an equal, all your virtues are being tested, not only your physical virtues, but also your mental and spiritual. Aeneas and Turnus had to muster all their military training, their strategy, situational awareness, and, knowing that the fate of their respective peoples rides on this fight, control the passions which naturally arise during a fight. At the risk of diving back into polemics, notice the stark contrast between this, and the types of conflict glorified in “sigma” clips. The protagonist is clearly dominant in these clips, and whatever upper hand his rival might have is only illusory, often explained away by an off-camera deal rendering the threat impotent. In the Virgilian world, these “power moves” are devoid of honor, in the same way that Aeneas slaughtering infantrymen, while necessary in war, is nothing to brag about. A man’s honor comes from a real fight, one where he has a reasonable chance of losing, but comes out triumphant.
Between Greece and Rome
Citing the Odyssey and the Aeneid are not to stake out “the liberal” or “the Western” view of masculinity, and could not be used to do so, simply because there are differences between why Odysseus and Aeneas are hailed as good men. One difference is in the moral framework, the particularist Homeric conception of virtue and the univeralist Stoic account. Another difference, which is related, is that Odysseus showed strong emotion throughout the Odyssey, and although Aeneas also shows emotion, Homer takes emotion, even strong emotion, to be natural, but Virgil consistently presents strong emotions as vicious (the adjectival form of vice).
What looking at the two great epics does is show what the range of discussion is for Western masculinity. It also presents us with models to emulate, with modifications perhaps, when we are asking ourselves if we are acting like men. Iris Murdoch tells us, “I can only choose within the world I can see, in the moral sense of ‘see’ which implies that clear vision is a result of moral imagination and moral effort.”11 Our moral imagination is formed by what music we listen to, movies we watch, the architecture surrounding us, and the literature we read. Reading literature that portrays strong men, who are truly masculine, forms a world of possibilities, and, in opening new possibilities, makes actions possible that were previously unimaginable. This is why literature is central to the liberal education, and perhaps why, as (good) literature is slowly eliminated in favor technical training, be it STEM or Political Science, the capacity for action is narrowing, being replaced by a few canned possibilities that makes the world look like it is filled with NPCs, even if these NPCs can rattle off interesting facts about engineering or quote from the NPCs given subculture's canon.
Chesterton, G.K. Orthodoxy. Doorlit Press. 8
MacIntyre, Alasdair. Whose Justice? Which Rationality? University of Notre Dame Press. Notre Dame, Indiana. 2014. 15
56-86, Homer
93, Homer,
211-219, Homer
238-253, Homer
167-184, Virgil
215-231, Virgil
808-823, Virgil
Murdoch, Iris. Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature. Penguin Books. New York, New York. 1999. 329